Library Voice

I love it when library school students stop by and chat. They usually reach me via the chat widget on the Business  Blog or via the chat widget on the Biz Wiki. The students usually have a few questions about using Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, or screencasts. Occasionally students will blog an analysis for some of the tools Iâ??ve used, and it often gives me some good feedback on what Iâ??m trying to do with the Business Blog and with the Biz Wiki. Library school affords you the opportunity to take a more scientific (and perhaps new) look at how things are done, so I appreciate the outsider looking in perspective.

In a recent post, Claudia analyzed the Business Blog and offered quite a few good comments. I thought I would take a few minutes to address a few of her comments at this time.  For my comments on Claudia’s awesome analysis, please see the post on my Business Blog.

Click to go to my cycling blog

In a previous post, I mentioned that I would likely start posting more about my cycling endeavors.  However, with some more reflection, and with some advice from other librarians, friends, cyclists, and bloggers, I’ve decided that I would go the two-blog route.   There are a number of cycling-specific blogs that I have admired and read for quite a while, and having a cycling-specific blog seemed like the best way for me to keep track of my adventures in riding my bikes.   Librarians likely don’t want to read about every single cycling workout on the indoor trainer, or the latest technology behind spandex shorts.  Likewise, cyclists probably don’t want to read about using a wiki as a subject guide, twitter for library outreach, information literacy, or my experiences in the classroom giving bibliographic (gasp!) instruction. As such, Library Voice,  will continue to be a blog devoted to my observations about libraries and technology, with the occasional talk about video games thrown in for good measure.   My other blog will focus specifically on my goal to ride the Tour de France    .  I realize that this is my blog, and I can write about whatever I want, but I’d like to maintain some consistency in the post topics.  Having two blogs should make it easier to rationalize what kind of content goes where.  Likewise, having two blogs means yet again that my content is all over the place, but I guess that’s the way things go.

I’ve received several positive comments from librarians and readers of this blog who say they appreciate the posts about cycling, as they give them some insight into my non-professional interests.   In order to link the Librarian Chad with Bike Rider Chad, I may occasionally post a digest of blog posts in Library Voice, which link back to my cycling blog.

If you’re interested in biking, I encourage you to subscribe to my cycling blog, which is currently located at redneckinspandex.wordpress.com.  I may eventually move the blog to my own web host, but for now you can find it on the wordpress.com domain.

Thanks for reading and happy riding!

If  you’re one of the 3 readers of this blog, you may have noticed that the content of this blog has shifted quite a bit over the past year.   When I wrote the “About” section of Library Voice three years ago, I said the following:

My primary purpose for this blog is to keep current with issues and changes in the library environment. As a Reference & Instruction Librarian, web manager, and Business & Economics Bibliographer, my interests (and job duties) tend to be all over the map. As such, the writings of this blog may cover a lot of different areas as well. Technology, reference and instruction, library budgets, even my own guitar playing (although not very good) may be discussed in this blog.

Over the years I’ve mostly written about libraries and technology, as evidenced by the categories of posts on my blog.  However, like many folks, I’ve started losing interest in simply limiting my blogging to library issues.  There’s quite a few library blogs out there now, so it seems that many of the topics are being covered pretty adequately.  In looking at my blog statistics, it’s interesting to see that the most popular posts are  generally not library-related.  For example, there are posts that deal with resetting a Flip Mino, gaming, using the Plam Treo Browser effectively, and even Guitar Hero on South Park.

With the coming of spring, I’m getting really geared up for riding my bike.  I’m trying to be better about logging my rides, and taking pictures or videos of the rides.  One of the things I have contemplated the idea of just using this blog for library-related  posts, and starting another blog for cycling-specific topics, and perhaps another for video blogging.  The problem with three blogs is trying to figure out what content to post where.  For example, if I take a video on a bike ride, would it go on the cycling blog or the video blog, or both?  I’ve been trying the dual blog approach with a blog set up to write about cycling, but I’ve been ignoring it quite a bit.  I’ve also found that I haven’t been giving this blog as much attention as I’d like to either.   I know some librarians have one blog for library things, and another for other topics (knitting comes to mind for some reason).  I don’t have enough time/content/ideas to keep two or more blogs running all the time, so, if I went the multiple-blog route, I probably would wind up having a bunch of dead blogs.  However, with so excellent niche blogs out there, it is tempting to start a new blog for every single topic you’re interested in.

Several months ago I changed the tagline of this blog to say “Libraries, Tech, Games, and Bikes” to reflect the many topics that interest me, and started down the path moving this blog from  a professional librarian blog to a more personal/professional blog that covers the topics in the tagline.  I’ve probably shyed away from writing too much about bikes and games, mostly because the name of the blog is “Library Voice.”  I’m going to be posting more content here that may not necessarily relate to Library things, but since I’ve got the domain name for another 2 years at least, I’m not likely to change the name anytime soon.  I also have no idea what I’d change the name to, as ChadBoeninger.com sounds both boring and a little vain.

I suppose this is yet another example of how our professional and personal lives are merging. I’ve found that trying to keep the personal and professional separtate is too much work. In an effort to reduce that work while blogging more, Library Voice will now cover more of my personal interests as well as professional topics.  If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, I hope you’ll stick around during this transition.  Thanks for reading.